The Plum in the Golden Vase: Or, Chin P'Ing Mei: The Gathering - Rilegato

Mei, Chin P'Ing

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691069328 ISBN 13: 9780691069326

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1993

Riassunto

This first of five planned volumes begins David Roy's long-awaited complete and annotated translation of an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel, the famous Chin Ping Mei. A work known primarily for its erotic realism, the Chin Ping Mei is also a landmark in the development of narrative art not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world historical context. Comparable in importance within its own narrative tradition to such seminal works as The Tale of Genji in Japan or Don Quixote in Europe, it is surprisingly modern in its rhetorical features, reminiscent at times of the Dickens of Bleak House, the Joyce of Ulysses or the Nabokov of Lolita, and also served as the model and inspiration for The Dream of the Red Chamber, the great eighteenth-century novel that is regarded as the culminating masterpiece of traditional Chinese fiction. Since all previous European language translations are either abridged or based on an inferior version of the text, Roy's faithful and lively translation is the first to do full justice to the author's meticulously woven rhetorical tapestry in all its complexity and splendor.
The Chin Ping Mei is the first novel of manners in Chinese literature and focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ching, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines and eventually exhausts himself in conspicuous consumption in the economic, political, and sexual spheres. Although the novel is set in the years 1112 through 1127, the final decades of the Northern Sung dynasty, the conditions are those of sixteenth-century China, a period of burgeoning economic growth and volatile social change that threatened the traditional values of Chinese society. The story of the corrupt rise and ignominious fall of Hsi-men Ching's household is both a reflection and a critique of these conditions and can be read as a microcosm of the moral disintegration of the Chinese body politic, culminating in the collapse of the ruling dynasty.
This first volume can stand on its own, as it tells a fascinating story that begins with Hsi-men Ching's conquest of the notorious Pan Chin-lien and his conniving in the poisoning of her husband and continues through the protagonist's intrigue with Li Ping-erh, the wife of his next-door neighbor and his sworn brother, to the death of the betrayed husband and Li Ping-erh's rough initiation as a member of Hsi-men Ching's household. The structural parallels between the first and second decades of chapters display the author's technique to advantage and enable the reader to appreciate his artistry even without knowledge of the story yet to come.
In this translation, the Chin Ping Mei can be understood and appreciated at a variety of levels by audiences ranging from specialists in Chinese literature, through students of the novel in a comparative perspective, to general readers looking for a compelling narrative replete with convincing portrayals of the darker side of human nature. "As for this story," as the anonymous preface to the Chin Ping Mei has it, "although it may be couched in the everyday language of the marketplace or the idle chatter of the boudoir, even a three-foot-tall lad can derive as much pleasure from it as though he were enabled to suck the nectar of Heaven."

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Recensione:

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994
"[A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers."--Amy Tan, New York Times Book Review

"[I]t is time to remind ourselves that The Plum in the Golden Vase is not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel be viewed as titillating, harshly realistic, or, in Mr. Roy's words, intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world, as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass pretty much every imaginable mood and genre--from sadism to tenderness, from light humor to philosophical musings, from acute social commentary to outrageous satire."--Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books

"David Tod Roy enters with zest into the spirit and the letter of the original, quite surpassing ... other earlier versions."--Paul St. John Mackintosh, Literary Review

"Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience."--Robert Chatain, Chicago Tribune Review of Books

"What Roy has already accomplished [in this volume] is enough to establish his translation as definitive. . . . A tremendous achievement."--Charles Horner, Commentary

Dalla quarta di copertina:

"This is the first complete English translation of world literature and will immediately supersede all existing partial and abridged translations in that language. Even aside from the stunning achievement of the translation itself, the book represents a lifetime of meticulous scholarship on an enormous number of Sinological subjects. This work is the culmination of David Roy's entire scholarly career and a compendium of his vast learning in all phases of traditional Chinese civilization."--Andrew Plaks, Princeton University

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0691069328
• ISBN 13: 9780691069326
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 724